Laurel and Hardy on AMC

Unlike many people, I don't recall ever being afraid of Laurel and Hardy.  However, I do remember that the comedians' old films were disquieting and made me uneasy.  Perhaps, this sense of discomfort arose from my relationship with my father.  He was preacher's son who watched Laurel and Hardy two-reelers on Sunday mornings instead of going to church. A heavy-set man with a beard, I always identified him with the rotund Oliver Hardy -- he had been an excellent athlete, despite his weight was light on his feet, and something of a bully.  However, watching several Laurel and Hardy two-reelers as well as Way our West on AMC, I discovered more than a few other aspects to their comedy sufficient to make a sensitive child (if that's what I was) a little nervous.

First, unlike the films of The Three Stooges, or other silent comedians, Laurel and Hardy's stunts are firmly rooted in a realistic physical world.  The injuries that they inflict upon one another involve the laws of gravity and Newton's rule that for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  They are pummeled by heavy falling objects, hurled through walls and the tops of lean-to sheds -- when they pull down an electrical fixture, a torrent of broken plaster and dust always descends with the unfortunate candelabra or lamp.  Similarly, the location for their misfortunes is clearly delineated:  the images are cogent, shot with deep focus, and reveal lower middle-class vistas full of hazard and mischief.  The mishaps in Laurel and Hardy films are, for the most part, plausible, even realistic -- what's not realistic is the fact that the accidents never seem to result in serious injury.  In Busy Bodies, a 1935 two-reeler, "the boys" as fans call them, are employees of a wood-working shop.   We see many different tables saws, spinning blades, planers, and jigsaws.  One can only shudder at the possibilities for mayhem posed by this equipment.   And, about two minutes into the film, a circular saw blade with vicious teeth falls from a wall and conks Olly on the head -- if the saw blade were inclined differently as it fell, it would have decapitated him.  Olly gets a paint brush glued to his face -- this is sheared off by Stan using a planer.  There are a variety of calamities involving chutes, ladders, and spinning blades.  In the Academy Award winning The Music Box (1932) Stan rips open a box and throws a board with a nail through it on the floor.  Olly steps on the board and the nail pierces his foot.  He has to stand on the board with his other foot to pull his transfixed foot off the board.  It makes you wince to watch this.   (A similar injury is depicted to induce horror in A Quiet Place, 2018.   In Way out West (1937), Olly falls through the roof of a lean-to and a big puff of dust rises from within the structure that he has crushed.  A block and tackle crashes into his skull (a gag repeated in The Music Box) and, in a reprise of the famous scene in Un Chien Andalou (which in many ways is similar to a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler), a donkey gets lifted up to the second floor of a building where it smashes a bunch of Victorian furniture.  All of this mayhem is not precisely realistic, but it is, certainly, plausible -- when Olly gets his pierced foot off the board, we can see the nail hole in the ball of his foot.  An inserted close-up shows the injury.

The film's also have peculiar sexual subtexts.  In Way Out West, Olly drops a locket down his shirt and has to disrobe almost entirely to retrieve this trinket.  The camera dwells lovingly on Olly's garments being ineptly peeled off him by Laurel.  Indeed, throughout Way Out West, Hardy is often semi-nude -- in one scene, he is hauled on a travois down a dusty lane half naked, wet clothes drying on poles around him.  In The Music Box, Hardy is a burly work man -- he looks fit and strong.  But five years later in Way Out West, he's majestically fat.  We see  his sloping white shoulders, his belly, his plump, boneless-looking upper arms.  The scene involving Olly being stripped by Stan is echoed in a long sequence in which a female vamp wearing a slinky white negligee tears Laurel's clothes off while tickling him so that he laughs hysterically -- she is looking for a real estate deed, but the image is clearly one that shows some sort of rape.  Stan Laurel, who invented these gags, operates with suggestion and implication that is, often, on the verge of becoming obscene.  So Laurel and Hardy combine serpentine, highly compressed and enigmatic sexual imagery with explicit sequences involving physical injury -- it's a weird mix.  Even stranger in Way Out West are the musical interludes -- Stan and Olly can't hear music without dancing and their graceful motions contrast in an alarming way with the otherwise feckless way of navigating the physical world.  How is it that such skillful dancers can't manage to step up over a curb without doing a pratfall?  (There is a similar sequence in The Music Box in which a player piano plays a medley of patriotic tunes while Laurel and Hardy cavort to the music in an inventive way.)  The child-like singing and dancing suggest other magical powers -- and, indeed, in Way out West, Laurel has the ability to snap his thumb and create a flame burning on that digit sufficient to light their way through the darkness.

Finally, the films, although ingenious and always very funny in one or two sequences, are generally not funny over all.  This doesn't mean the pictures aren't good -- in fact, they are excellent, but they're not exactly funny, at least, not for most of the time.  Rather, the film's involve nightmarish Sisyphean endeavors, trying to push a piano up a huge flight of steps, extricating one's fingers from various window-frames and pinch points, elaborate clothing malfunctions, and endless gags involving ladders, elastic bands, and hoisting heavy objects.  In German, there is a notion called Tuecke des Objeks -- meaning something like "the malice of objects"; this is the concept that inanimate objects aren't really inanimate -- instead they exhibit malicious agency.  This concept is always on display in Laurel and Hardy comedies and it's often not a pretty picture.  Generally, the sense that one has in watching these films is that human beings are enmeshed or entangled with objects that are predictably malevolent and that the human response is engage in combat with these objects, combat that the objects inevitably win.  We may think of other people or society or, even, death as obstacles that impair our freedom and drag us down to perdition -- this is bearable.  But it is, perhaps, unbearable to imagine that a ladder, a flight of steps, and a pulley are all that is really necessary to make our lives into a living hell.